All journeys are spiritual journeys. But our trip along the Oversea Highway through the Florida Keys, and particularly the 7 Mile Bridge between Knight’s Key and Little Duck Key, somehow took on an spiritual significance for me that I maybe didn’t understand at the time. It was 2018. We were visiting my daughter, Tiara, our son in law, and their new baby in Miami.
Leo and I were still married in 2018 and I didn’t realize, at that time, that this would ever change. I did know this much. While we were in Miami I wanted to see the Hemingway Museum on Key West. The story is that Hemingway, coming back from France and his stint with first wife Hadley, stopped at Key West with second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, and fell in love with the islands, the weather, the sport fishing, the drinking, and, one might conjecture, the constant brooding mood of vacillation.
The question of whether Hemingway was happy that he left Hadley, or not, has interested scholars ever since. In the short term, the answer was yes, but most commentators say ‘no’ after reading the section about Pauline’s arrival in Hem’s life in the memoir, A Moveable Feast, perhaps the long term answer was no.
You Don’t Know When You’re Happy
I’ve started saying recently that when you’re happy, you don’t actually realize it. You don’t walk around thinking ‘I’m happy.’ Generally, it’s literally like that Gordon Lightfoot song, Sundown, which describes when “you’re feeling no pain.” The absence of discomfort is somehow akin to being happy.
Or When You’re Unhappy …
And when you’re unhappy, you don’t generally sit around, saying “I’m unhappy.” You just complain about incidentals.
Often, in my experience, when I feel most unhappy, I sink into irrational fears. My main goal on the day of this story, during my and Leo’s day-long trip to Key West, was to meet up, on physical ground, with the historical Hemingway. And secondarily, conquer my fear of the Seven Mile Bridge.
The first part we had done. In fact, I had prepared for this pilgrimage to the house of the Writer’s Writer by reading the Hemingway biography by Mary V. Dearborn, giving me generous insight into the workings of the old Hemingway House on Key West. Its furniture was chosen by Pauline Hemingway. There was a gangplank that led across the back yard from their bedroom to his writing room.
In the Hemingway life, there were three important spaces. The bedroom, the writing room, and the bar. And Key West offered sumptuous opportunities for all three.
Today I can still remember the low natural stonework retaining wall that rimmed the Hemingway property, designed, no doubt, to protect it from the storm surge. The Keys had weathered a horrific hurricane in 1935 in which hundreds died. But the everyday life of Key West was beautiful skies, fishing boats, beach life, and bars.
The Tropical Beauty that Hemingway Found
Key West was arguably Hemingway’s favorite residence. Though he didn’t stay.
At the end of the day, I had seen the house, not to mention the many roosters that patrol Key West. Now, Leo and I walked a mile back to the bus stop and waited for the tour bus to take us back to Tiara and Bob’s house in Miami. We had driven our Ford Expedition to Miami from Texas, but Tiara had suggested we not drive out to the islands. “You don’t want to have to steer the Overseas Highway,” she said. “The road is narrow and scary. Leave it to a professionals.”
We had traversed the Overseas Highway in the morning, and I hadn’t thought it too frightening. Now we walked down dusty streets, beside small shops and the huge statue of a sailor kissing a girl at the end of WWII, then sat down in a tiny coffee shop on a corner. The kind of place that sells hand made, hand fired local coffee mugs.
We reached the bus stop, beside a wharf half full of boats, and stood with other tourists. The bus came around the corner, with its large ear-like side mirrors sticking out on either side.
The Bus
“Here’s the Pullman,” Leo said, looking down at his map, his panama hat shading his face. The term harked back to his years, which still continue today, as a summer tour guide in Italy and Greece. A “Pullman” is what Italians call a tour bus, as opposed to a city bus or school bus. The Pullman was gleaning, with colorful black and red paint. We got on.
I was apprehensive. I was thinking of the Seven Mile Bridge. It had been fine this morning. But now the day was dropping into night.
As we pulled out and rolled across Key West in the direction of the mainland, I looked out at the quaint Key Cottages with their small paned windows and their white picket fences and the decorative ponds in front and was embarrassed to realize I was more scared to cross the bridge this time. I felt like I’d never make it back to the mainland. And why?
The Clowning Bus Driver Falls Silent
On the way out here the bus driver called us “My People.” He explained to us in both Spanish and English when we passed where the limo drove off into the water in True Lies. This inspired only partial confidence.
His joke about this being his second day on the job helped not at all. “My gosh, man!” I thought silently, before reassuring myself that they would never assign a new driver to this route.
Perhaps the joke was meant to accentuate the fear of the experience, kind of like decorative warning signs they put up beside the roller coaster at Disneyland like “Big drop ahead.” This morning he had been a comedian. But tonight he was silent.
A Reflection on Fear
“Come on, the odds are on your side,” I told myself. I began to fall asleep. I began to think about the symbolism of water. We were gliding above the water now, above the fish, above the sand. Water which is life and renewal, water which is mystery and hope. And yet. Water is where you can drown. Water is where you can be lost and never found. The ocean is as close to infinite as anything we know. My dream drifted. Water was life, and death. We lived in this liminal space between the two, and now, I was on the bus suspended above water, and I felt as if the roadway would crumble and fall. But it did not.
There was a decision to be made here and I didn’t even realize it at the time. My fascination with the story of Hem and his four wives reminds me now of Freud’s claim that every dream is in fact a fantasy. Perhaps my Hemingway obsession was based in my own desire to move on past my second marriage.
Leo was fond of saying “Oh well, if you die, what do you think is going to happen? You’re going to sit there and say, ‘Oh no, I’m dead?” Somehow while this could be comforting, it also made me angry. Perhaps because it was a way of avoiding talking about what I was actually feeling. “It will never actually happen,” was Leo’s answer. But my belief was different. Everything will eventually happen. I could not trust Leo’s view. Not because he was wrong, he was generally correct. But because his view did not take into consideration my well-being.
Sleeping and Waking
I was woken up as the bus lurched. Just a mild steering correction. Not actually a last-ditch effort to avoid going over the rails. I sprung awake, three words on my lips: “The Seven Mile!”
It was nothing. I fell back asleep, only to awaken to a siren. Oh no. I thought as the cop car passed us on the left. By now it was dark and I couldn’t see anything out the window. There was no way of knowing whether we we were on the bridge or not.
“Why do you have to be so paranoid?” I thought to myself. “Whatever happened out there it’s probably not *that* bad and you don’t know whether you are on the bridge or not. Cars can crash, or break down, on an island too.”
I fell asleep again. The driver was silent. The interior lights on the bus were off. Leo was sitting beside me reading a Thomas Wolfe novel about Miami with a book light on a bendable stem. Apparently he was completely unconcerned about the Seven Mile or the bus driver’s reliability.
I didn’t tell him about my panic attacks anymore. Because, his response, his lack of concern, always made me feel worse. I had learned. Don’t talk about it if you’re scared, or if you’re sick, and be really careful if you’re angry. Telling Leo you’re angry could lead to a fight. Which could take hours or even days.
The First Unexpected Mishap
We passed the first accident. The cop car lights were lurid flashes of blue and red in the curtain of night. As the lights blinked, the outline of a tow truck appeared and disappeared.
There was no break in the rail. But where was the car the tow truck had come to collect? Where?! I didn’t know. The guard rails were said to be repurposed train tracks. How fast did a car have to be going to plow through a train track? I was pretty sure no one was able to get going that fast this evening. We were travellng along at about 35 or 40 miles per hour.
“You have got to get ahold of yourself,” I thought in silence. “If the bus is on the road, good, if it’s off, it’s too late. What do you think, you can change anything now that you’ve chosen to get on? If all this worry is doing any good, why don’t you go up and tell that clownish bus driver that you’re scared and you want to get off on Isla Morada? Do you think he’ll let you off?”
Honestly, at the time, even if I asked, I doubted it. Although now, looking back, it seems to me, if I’d been willing to make a scene, he would have had to.
The Second Mishap
At least I had a mantra now. I told myself, “Still on the road, all to the good. Still on the road, all to the good.”. I fell asleep again.
“Oh My God.” Said Leo.
I opened my eyes. Up ahead, bright yellow flames in the night. We approached closer. A minivan had spun backward into our lane and it was on fire.
My daughter’s words echoed: “I think you’d better take the bus.” Thank you God, for giving me a daughter with wisdom. Thank God for the clownish bus driver who was behind the wheel instead of me. If it had been me, I could have been driving the minivan. I could only assume that, the first responders being near, it would be all right. No one was in the water. Me or anyone else. Yet.
Leo Never Turned One Hair
The truth is, I now look back on that moment and wonder: why did I feel so terrified? In feeling like the accident should have been me, I was taking in someone else’s sorrows gratuitously.
Surely if I had been happy, I could have relaxed and said “Que sera’ sera’? Assumed they were okay. Not that their misfortune somehow predicted my own.
The memory today of Leo quietly reading a book reminds me of other Leos, other times when I was falling apart and he didn’t notice. Actually, he was the same as my mother. You couldn’t show weakness, such as fear, to Leo. It would invite mockery. A person was expected to be strong. He was busy, reading.
Last Friday I was at the orchestra with my mother. Some sharp words had passed between us at dinner and I sat in the darkness, with tears streaming down my face. How could I express my feelings to anyone? I would cry in the dark instead.
Today, this scene seems so much like the tour bus trip.
I Couldn’t Say I Was Scared
So I wrote it down for myself. But what I couldn’t admit even to myself was that my fear, came out of sadness, and the sadness came from the futility of the projects I had embarked on. My interest in following the footsteps of Hemingway were never going to result in me becoming anything like the kind of writer Hemingway was. And going on vacations with Leo, and doing things that were supposed to be fun with him, would never be actually fun the way they were supposed to be, because Leo didn’t connect with me emotionally. I remember at one point, at the very end, I told the marriage counselor, “He doesn’t even really believe I’m a person!”
Her face was shocked, perhaps even remonstrate. But I was serious.
But I couldn’t admit that was the problem the day we crossed the Seven Mile Bridge. I could only sit there and make a kind of strange OCD substitution, where something was definitely wrong, but the thing that was wrong was the danger of the bridge. Once we survived that, perhaps the wrong thing would be gone.
It didn’t work of course. We never even came close to falling into the ocean. But that didn’t help. The problem I was living with wasn’t fear of the bridge. The problems I lived with continued.
The Lost Notebook
In a last Hemingway connection, the notes I took on our trip to Key West, which I was planning on turning into an article about Hemingway and his Key West haunt, were lost on the way back from the Miami bus stop where we got off that evening. The notebook, a nine by 12 hardcover one, had my journal entries for three or four months in it. I tried to recover it but the Uber driver hadn’t seem the notebook and the bus company had no records of finding it either. I thought at the time it was like Hemingway’s Suitcase, only, in a to-me bitter irony, it was nowhere near as interesting or mysterious as Hemingway’s Suitcase because the notebook was written by me, not him.
Everything that happens to you becomes part of your integrated life experience. This is what you use to live your life. If something is bad, well, that’s your journey, you’re supposed to learn from it. The memory of Key West is still clear to me, even without the notebook. The bus ride, with its blackness and flashes of light, the Hemingway House, with its stonework and typewriter collection, and Leo in the Panama hat, standing beside me as if he belonged there. We are in motion, like the sands under the sea, and we don’t know, really, which way were are going. We also don’t always realize that we can change course.
The Critical Step is when You Get on the Bus
Facing my fear in crossing the Seven Mile Bridge was useful. It hammered home that my projections about what going to happen were, at times, frivolous beyond belief. My claims that I couldn’t leave Leo because (fill in the blank) were simply manifestations of my fear. I also learned this. The critical step you take is when you get on the bus. That moment of decision will carry you across the bridge.
There is another way of thinking about this. Our lives are like ocean voyages. If you change your course mid-ocean, you arrive at a different port, and until you’ve arrived, you can still make a course correction. The disasters which you project usually don’t happen. And the wise person measures out their life with a spirit of meditation and a thought for the future. He or she will takes risks that might seem bigger than they actually are, because, most of the time, the odds are on your side.
That for me, is the lesson of the Seven Mile Bridge.
Annotated Bibliography:
Blogs:
From VisitFlorida … A decription of driving the bridge today and in the past, it’s history, and what it was like when the writer was a kid, and before that, what it was like in the hurricaine of 1936 which destroyed the Overseas Railroad. Vivid and personal.
Water Symbolism from the University of Michigan Catalogue of Symbols … “Water is also one of the four elements essential to life in traditional western philosophy … “
Books
To Have and Have Not, the story of Harry Morgan, a sport fishing pilot whose way of solving problems is pretty hard boiled. Earned a one-star review from GoodReads contributor “Ethan” who called it misogynistic and racist, not to mention gratuitously violent. All true. Yet the book offers a compelling and detailed portrait of the way people lived on the Keys when Hemingway was resident.
Ernest Hemingway, A Biography, by Mary V Dearborn. The complete story of Hem’s life. The part about Key West is telling.
